Frowning takes 68 muscles.
Smiling takes 6.
Pulling this trigger takes 2.
I'm lazy.
Posted on 08/29/2010 3:23:07 PM PDT by James C. Bennett
It's okay for the government to plant a GPS tracker on the car parked in your driveway, tracking everywhere you go. It doesn't violate your rights, at all—according to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals.
The US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit, which covers California, Arizona, Oregon and a bunch of the western US, has ruled that the government did nothing wrong when the DEA planted a GPS tracking device on Juan Pineda-Moreno's Jeep, which was parked in his driveway—without a search warrant. The underpinning for the ruling is that there is no reasonable expectation of privacy in your driveway—unless you're loaded and it's kept safe, hidden from the outside world by gates or other security measures—and you have no reasonable expectation not to be tracked by the government.
It's the worst of all possible outcomes, our darkest nightmares about the increasingly mindful technology we put in our pockets come true—that technology being blithely turned against us by our government in a move that only be described as Orwellian, even if that goes the writerly instinct to avoid cliches. Because it's not so much cliche as it is fact. That decision says it's okay for the government to track our movements, everywhere we go, without so much as a scratched slip of paper, eliding all of the protections that are supposedly in place to prevent that kind of thing from happening.
The 'slippery slope' is typically deployed as a trope to argue against men marrying men sliding into a world where dudes do dogs, but if you squint, it's not so hard to see how if it's okay for the government to plant a GPS tracker on your vehicle in the night, without a warrant, it could progress to suddenly being okay to flip the switch on your phone, tracking everywhere it went—after all, if Google can know where you're at, why can't the government?
The Ninth US Circuit Court of Appeals is the same court that ruled it was okay to search the contents of laptops without even a reasonable suspicion that you're doing something illegal, arguing they're just like any other dumb piece of luggage. Together these two rulings—along with every other boneheaded government utterance about technology, from copyright to broadband regulation—highlight how desperately we need smarter, more considerate laws, rules and regulations when it comes to how the government can use technology for and against the people.
Otherwise we're screwed.
I’m sure that some smart person will start up a website that shows what they look like and where to look for them, so that they can be conveniently affixed to a passing, random bus.
The spy gadget market for GPS detectors just went up.
Already found it. :-)
I should have read down before replying.
It shouldn’t be too long before some poor dupe is dragged before the courts and summarily found guilty for fatally shooting some DEA flunky while he/she plants one of these devices.
Remember they did this to Scott Peterson when they were worried he would flee to Mexico after killing his wife, Laci?
BTW, Gizmodo also had an [illegal] GPS blocker on their site last week.
Time to put GPS devices on some judges’ cars and publish their activities.
If it's legal for the police to do it, it's legal for anyone.
I'm sure the late night visits to the cheap motels will be very interesting to the public.
A good friend had an interesting experience. A decade ago he regularly flew between the US and Mexico. One day he found a hidden transponder on his aircraft. He removed it and later placed it on the local DEA supervisors vehicle.
The bumbling feds probably lost track even of that.
One word- “APPEAL”.
WTF!!!!!!! The hell you say.
No doubt if one discovered and destroyed the tracking device, one would be brought up on charges for destroying govt property.
Is it illegal to remove the tracking device?
First my dog would be barking and then I’d shoot whoever it was messing around with my car(s).
I’m not to worried... hopefully one of the judges from the US Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit would be there as well. Might as well get my monies worth.
Face it. Any corrupt administration can order its police to do anything at all, and they will obey. Police are trained to obey and get their jollies from catching “criminals” even if they aren’t really criminals but their boss says they are. It’s still fun.
The police come with deadly force, handcuffs. nightsticks, mace, tasers and the ability to put you away for the rest of your life after confiscating all your property.
So you don’t mess with the police. They are no more guilty than the police dog - jess doing what they are tole.
Ping for Privacy...
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